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TREKCORE >
VOY >
VIS À VIS
> Behind the Scenes
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This episode had the working title "Perspectives".
The term ultimately used as the title of this installment, "vis
à vis," is a French term literally meaning "face to face". |
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ctor Dan Butler likened this episode to a certain
film. "It's sort of [an] homage to Face/Off,"
Butler reckoned, "the movie with Nicolas Cage and John Travolta."
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This episode's writer, Robert Doherty, was – at the
time of writing the installment – an assistant to the producers
of Star Trek: Voyager. |
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Seven of Nine actress Jeri Ryan was impressed by
Dan Butler's acting here, in his various roles as Steth as well
as Tom Paris and the alien intruder when each of the latter two
are occupying Steth's body. "He's got a tough role to play," the
actress related about Butler, "and he's doing a really good
job." |
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Actor Robert Duncan McNeill appreciated that this
episode gave him an opportunity to play the rebelliousness of a
young Tom Paris. "It's fun, in this episode, to play those
qualities that I came on playing, you know? It's always fun to
play the bad guy! It's the Paris that we know now, [who] is a
good guy, but he's got this secret in this episode, you know.
And so, it's great. Everybody thinks he's still the good guy,
but he gets to cause some trouble." |
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This episode's production period included 6 January
1998, a day on which Jeri Ryan became distracted by the
prosthetics that Dan Butler wore. "Jeri [...] had a very
difficult focus problem," Butler remarked,
"and would go, 'I was
staring at your nostrils and, you know, [the forehead
prosthetics].'" The day after this incident, an amused Ryan
herself commented, "Well, it's a little problematic, because
he's got [two noses] and you look right in his [upper] nostrils,
so it was throwing me off a little bit yesterday. It's like a
magnet; you just look right at it. And, of course, he's
[pointing at it] and blowing both noses, which doesn't help,
doesn't make things any easier." The activities on the day when
Ryan made that statement included not only video interviews with
her, Dan Butler and Robert Duncan McNeill but also the shooting
of the scene in which the alien intruder transfers between the
bodies of Steth and Paris. |
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The songs playing at the beginning and end of the
episode in the holodeck are "Night Rider" and "Let's Go Trippin'"
by Dick Dale. Ronald B. Moore – this installment's visual
effects supervisor – was influential in selecting this music,
particularly the former composition. "Since it was a '60s kind
of thing I was able to get them to use music from Dick Dale,"
Moore recalled. "Dick came down, and I was able to give him a
tour of the set." The song that plays in the episode's final
scene was a result of a recommendation from Dennis McCarthy, who
had once been a member of Dick Dale's backing band and was now
the composer of this episode. Moore offered, "I was told that he
heard the music and said, 'I used to be a Deltone.' This is a
small world. He suggested that they close the show with another
Dick Dale song. They got to [do that]." (Cinefantastique, Vol.
30, No. 9/10, p. 103) |
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CGI involved in the design of Steth's ship was done
by Digital Muse, under the supervision of Ron Moore. To create
the effect of both Steth's ship and a shuttlecraft individually
emerging from coaxial space, Moore took inspiration from origami
and decided to surround each craft in an outline of energy.
"To
create these ships that unfolded, I decided to do kind of a
literal thing, so that a ship would be like origami and unfold,"
Moore remembered. "We could get a little bit of energy to
outline the shape, and then inside it we would see the ship
unfold and fill it up. That would give it shape, so you'd have a
feeling that it was a ship you were looking at all the way
through, yet it was still unfolding. The problem with putting
energy on the outside, it makes it harder to see what's inside.
So it was a delicate balance [....] Energy defined the shape."
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Showing Steth's ship destabilizing in the teaser
involved coloring the energy outline in shades that were unusual
for the craft. "I tried to show that [with] color [....] When
Steth was having trouble we had a lot of reds and oranges start
running through this shell which was normally blue and green,"
Ron Moore explained. "I've found that in the [compositing] bay,
I have some control, and do the final tweaking there. That's
what we did with the color." |
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Ron Moore found some difficulty with visualizing
the morph in the scene wherein Paris and the alien impostor,
disguised as Steth, swap bodies. "Digital Muse did some nice
work on that," Ron Moore commented.
"It got really confusing
when we got Steth and Paris together up against the wall. This
is Paris to Steth, this is Steth to Paris. I was afraid I was
going to get one of them wrong." |
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The creation of the scene in which Paris, in
Steth's body, is confronted by Daelen's ship and a pair of
Benthan patrol ships utilized CGI models designed by the visual
effects company Digital Muse. Ron Moore said of the vessels,
"We
weren't going to see them much, just [in] a couple of shots
[....] I would get sketches from Muse and pick a direction that
we'd want to go, make whatever changes we felt necessary. That's
what we did for both [ship classes]. We wanted to play this size
thing a little bit, with the biggest one being Daelen's ship."
The size differential helped make it conceivable that the
arrival of Daelen's ship would intimidate the Benthan crafts
into immediately departing, relieving the visual effects artists
of having to create a big battle. |
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This episode was enjoyable for Ron Moore. He
happily stated, "That was a fun show for me."
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The design of Steth's ship was re-used in a number
of subsequent Voyager episodes ("The Voyager Conspiracy", "Drive", "Workforce", and "Workforce, Part II"). Interestingly,
it also appeared in an episode of Joss Whedon's Firefly. |
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